New Google+ Features

Developers and tech-geeks nationwide attended the annual Google I/O Developer conference in San Francisco for three days this week. This is where Google rolled out the new updates for its Google+ platform. The company added 41 new features. Even though Google+ has 190 million monthly active users, it’s still not as popular as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Adding 41 updates will make the platform more appealing and more competitive. The software updates include changes to Stream, Photos, and Hangouts.

User Interface Changes

Google+ now features a multi-column interface instead of a singular stream, which is similar to the layouts of both Pinterest and Facebook. The platform will also add related hashtags to posts and images, so if you’re following a particular brand or a team, it may tag it for you.

Photo Features

With your permission, Google will now automatically upload your mobile pictures to the cloud. The company is offering 15 GB of free cloud storage for full-size images. This will preserve the quality and resolution of each image. Unlike Instagram and Facebook where your photos are shrunk.

Auto Highlights

This feature identifies the best quality and most important images from your uploaded photo albums. For example, if you upload 500 photos, the Auto Highlights feature will scan them and select the ones that are in focus, have good exposure and saturation, contain landmarks, contain people, people who are smiling, and people who are in your family.

Auto Enhance

You can soften the appearance of wrinkles, remove redeye, adjust color saturation and exposure, and reduce noise to improve the quality of your photos with the Auto Enhance feature.

Auto Awesome

The Auto Awesome feature is indeed awesome. If someone is not smiling in a perfect group shot, this feature will identify the best shot of each person in group pictures and merge them to create one great picture. Auto Awesome can also detect a set of photos (minimum of five) that were taken in succession and will combine the images in a short animated .gif. In addition, this feature can create a panoramic photo from a series of images with an overlapping landscape, and create a photo booth style layout of self-portraits with similar backgrounds.

Google Hangout App Upgrade

The new Hangout App is available for web, Android and iOS devices. It combines the video chat service, Messenger and Google Talk into one application. It allows for group video chats, the ability to save conversations and re-watch them later, and sync messages across devices.

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